TOEFL ITP Reading set 030
Reading Comprehension practice — read the passage and choose the best answer.
การสัมผัสภาษาและการยืมคำศัพท์
- Line numbers appear every 5 lines.
- Answer all 10 questions, then choose ตรวจคำตอบ to see the Thai translation, score summary, and explanation.
- Use Previous / Next to open the previous or next practice set.
Language contact occurs when speakers of different languages
interact for trade, migration, conquest, or digital exchange.
One of the most visible results is lexical borrowing: a
community adopts words from another language and reshapes
5
them to fit local sound patterns and grammar. Borrowed items
often fill gaps for new technologies, foods, or institutions,
yet speakers may also prefer foreign labels for prestige even
when native equivalents already exist. Linguists distinguish
loanwords that keep much of their original form from calques,
10
which translate foreign compounds piece by piece into native
parts. Over generations, frequent loans may lose their foreign
feel and become ordinary vocabulary that children acquire
without noticing any outside origin at all.
Not every contact situation produces the same borrowing rate.
15
Intense bilingualism, unbalanced power between groups, and
prolonged trade corridors tend to accelerate transfer, while
strong language ideologies that prize purity can slow it.
Phonology filters what enters: sounds absent from the
receiving language may be replaced, shortened, or dropped
20
so that loans sound more familiar to local ears. Morphology
also adapts loans so they take familiar plural markers or
verb endings used in everyday speech. Dictionaries and
schools sometimes resist loans, yet spoken practice often
outruns formal prescription in real communities. Historical
25
layers of contact leave stratified vocabularies in which
older loans sit beside newer ones from different donor
languages across successive periods of contact. Studying
these layers helps historians reconstruct past alliances and
migration routes that written records only partly document.
30
In classrooms, awareness of borrowing can reduce stigma
around mixed speech and clarify why related languages share
unexpected cognates that confuse beginning learners. Digital
media now spreads loans faster than earlier centuries of
face-to-face trade alone, but the underlying mechanisms—
35
need, prestige, and adaptation—remain central to how
vocabularies grow through contact across linked speech
communities worldwide in both rural and urban settings.